An active part of the investigation? You got it, Dark thought. More than you know.
chapter 62
New York City / Hell’s Kitchen
6:37 A.M. EST
Wandering the early-morning streets of Manhattan, Sqweegel did a little shopping.
This was truly a novelty to be savored. So many things he procured through online orders, real credit accounts assigned to fake identities, post office boxes and pieces of real estate set up for the sole purpose of receiving packages. This was essential to his mission.
And that’s how he’d done the majority of the shopping for this excursion to New York City. It was too risky to drop in and, say, rent a white van in person. Better to set it up online, then take advantage of one of the automated kiosks that made the rental experience completely anonymous.
But there were a few things on his list that he could pick up in person.
Especially when you were wearing a disguise that made you look like most residents of the city—completely unremarkable. Cap pulled down over your forehead. Lightweight black jacket on your back. White sneakers on your feet.
So during this trip he took advantage of the opportunity.
First stop, last night: one of the last independently owned hardware stores in Hell’s Kitchen. The floors were wooden slats, and some of the merchandise was displayed in wooden barrels, not UPC-coded shelves stocked by computer. He smiled at the counterman and purchased his blowtorch, metal starter, garden spade, and garden shears. Just another New Yorker going home at night to do a little DIY on his place.
Next stop, this morning: a corner grocery store, opening for the early-morning commute. Manhattan was still full of these; the chains hadn’t quite figured out how to successfully infiltrate the island. He wandered the narrow, crowded aisles until he found what he was searching for: cardboard containers of table salt. He also helped himself to a plastic container meant for take-away salad-bar items and filled it with cherry tomatoes.
The final stop before retreating to his Manhattan hidey-hole—he had hidden dungeons all over the world—wasn’t a store at all. Instead, he returned to the banks of the Hudson, to one of the few nonindustrialized, nonprivatized chunks of land near the river. He took his new garden spade from the bag and started digging.
After a few minutes he found his thick, squirming prize. He placed it on top of the dirt, then dumped his container of tomatoes. Let the scavengers of the Hudson enjoy them.
Then he gently lowered the snail into the container. It struggled to make sense of its new surroundings. Sqweegel thought it was an abnormally beautiful specimen, with markings in varying shades of brown and green.
What did you do to God to deserve a life that was essentially a living burial?
He used the garden shears to poke holes in the top of the container, then placed his snail into the brown paper shopping bag with the rest of his grocery items. Good thing, Sqweegel thought, the snail was unable to read. Otherwise, it might really start to worry. Especially if the snail was able to intuit what Sqweegel had planned for it.
His hunter, Dark, on the other hand, could read. He could read extraordinarily well.
Sqweegel peered down into the bag and watched the snail pulse and slither mindlessly against its plastic prison. He thought of Dark struggling against his own barriers, especially the ones Sqweegel had erected especially for his hunter. Dark was a mortal man gifted with the ability to see the things few could. But was he starting to understand the messages he’d been given?
Yes, Sqweegel thought. I think he is.
To play with snails, log into LEVEL26.com and enter the code: getout
chapter 63
Malibu, California
4:38 A.M. PST
Under the cover of night: a gloved hand lifted the glass cutter out of a small zippered bag, along with a suction cup. The cup sucked glass, the blade did its thing in a perfect circle. Pop went the disc of glass.
The hand reached in and unlocked the latch to the sliding door.
He was inside.
Inside the house again.
Then he crawled up the staircase, headed for the master bedroom, leaving his clothes behind like a butterfly shedding its chrysalis. He moved at an agonizingly slow rate.
The intruder paused at the door and looked inside at the empty room, completely stripped of furniture and any sign that a couple had once lived there. He remembered when it was full of things—a king-sized bed, flat-screen TV, sleeping dogs—everything. He imagined them now, as he crawled into the room on the tips of his fingers and the balls of his feet.
No deductive logic. No reasoned guesses. No gut. No hunch.
I am the monster; what am I thinking?
He wormed his way to the imaginary bed. He stayed there for a long moment, trying to put his mind in the right place.
Dark wanted to know what it felt like to hover about a defenseless, sleeping woman.
He imagined Sibby curled up on top. Only it’s not Sibby. Not his Sibby. No, this is just someone close to his adversary. A woman he can use. A woman he can have a little fun with.
He unzipped the imaginary hood at the top of his head, then removed an imaginary washcloth, already soaked with chloroform. He pressed it down over her mouth. He felt her fight back. Struggle.
And then the screen goes blank.
But what’s happening now? What’s the monster doing to her?
It hurts to think about it, but fuck your pain. You want to catch this creepy son of a bitch, you’re going to have to think like him, then think better than him. You can’t shy away because it’s too painful.
Stop him, Sibby had said. I’ll be here when you get back.
Go ahead.
Be the monster, then.
You’ve got a beautiful, pregnant, unconscious woman sprawled out on the bed before you, naked and helpless. You’re the monster loose in the bedroom. You can do anything you want. What do you do?
Do you hurt the baby? Do you feel up inside of her because you’re curious? No, you’re not curious. You know everything about babies, because sometimes you leave them alive. You wouldn’t hurt the baby inside, because the baby’s innocent, free of sin. For now.
This woman, on the other hand; what is her sin? Why are you running your fingers over her moist clit and pulling apart her labia and examining her like a doctor? You don’t leave any visible bruises or cuts or scrapes, but you make her sore. You make her confused. You make her wonder the next morning what happened. You make her lie to her husband.
So is she one of the two who will cry?
The four who will sigh?
You’re the monster; you’re trying to tell the world something—so what is it you’re trying to say? What do you want more than obeying your primal urge to slice and fuck and squeeze and rip and break and suck and lick and punch and slap this woman before you?
Why have you come here tonight, Monster?
Dark padded carefully into their master bathroom and turned on the hot water. Allowed the room to be overwhelmed with steam. Then he traced the phone number on the mirror, exactly the way Sqweegel had done.
Once the steam cleared, he began his search. The tiled floor. The walls of the shower. The sides of the sink. Every inch, methodically.
And then there was a soft tone from his phone at the foot of the stairs. There was a text message waiting for him.
It was from Josh Banner. The results were in.
chapter 64
5:45 A.M.
Riggins had imported Special Circs’ top DNA man to L.A. But instead, Dark had called on Banner again. They spoke each other’s language. And Banner wouldn’t get caught up in Special Circs procedure. He would just focus on the work, to the exclusion of all else. To Banner, the work was everything.
Dark was with him now, awaiting the results. Just another minute, Banner assured him. He’d already taken a pair of surgical scissors and snipped away samples of the floor from the seventeen-year-old mother’s bedroom—the murder v
ictim from the clip he’d watched—then placed them in a test tube. Added saline to loosen the DNA, then let the G mass spec have at it. The tube spun and rotated under the guided light.
And finally, a few hours later:
Ping.
Dark was not entirely surprised when the sample, compared to the records in the Special Circs database back in Quantico, brought up a blinking screen:
CONFIDENTIAL SOURCE
LEVEL 5 CLEARANCE REQUIRED
Banner looked back at Dark questioningly. A message like this meant that the sample came from someone high up in the federal government. They needed the okay from someone quite a few pay grades higher to go any further.
“Nothing to worry about,” Dark said. “I know who it is—I’m just eliminating people from a scene. Got something else for you to run, too.”
“Yeah?” Banner asked. “Something cool?”
Dark reached into his pocket and pulled out a small Dewar’s bottle in a paper vomit bag.
“Oh,” said Banner, disappointed.
“If you can match this against the previous sample, it’ll set my mind at ease a bit.”
Banner smirked. “You’ve got a man on your team who likes to drink and exercise proper dental hygiene. Sounds like a real winner to me.”
“You have no idea,” Dark said.
A short while later the results were back; yes, the same man who had used this toothpick had also knocked down this mini-bottle of scotch. He didn’t share, either—not the toothpick or the booze. There were no other traces of DNA on either.
There was a final sample Dark needed matched. This was easy; it had already been entered into the system. All he’d needed to do was import the file from the Special Circs central files. It was a blood sample.
“Finally,” Banner had said. He enjoyed working with bodily fluids a little too much.
The blood was another match.
Dark thanked Banner and stepped out into the hallway and opened the file. One he couldn’t share with Banner.
The file contained crime-scene photos—which Riggins had finally shaken loose from Wycoff’s people—from the Charlotte Sweeney murder. That was the teenaged mother’s name. The one whose baby boy watched her die. Sounded so sweet, Dark thought automatically, then realized that no, it didn’t. Charlotte was close to harlot. Sweeney sounded like sweet. Sweet Charlotte the harlot. The cunt. The unwed mother, who needed to be taught a lesson.
Dark flipped through the photos, which told the story in flashes:
A patio door to a suburban D.C. town house. Nice place for a teenaged unwed mother. Furniture from a high-end catalog. One phone call, and everything is delivered for you. No books. No knickknacks. No idiosyncratic collections.
Now closer on the door. Trademark circle made with a glass cutter. Fragments of ground glass on the carpet below.
Blood splatters along the carpet.
Through the hallway and into the master bedroom. Charlotte Sweeney’s room.
And now more stains between a mattress and box spring that had been stripped of their sheets. The box spring was heavily stained, and the blood flow ran down its side. Blood hadn’t flowed cleanly; it had issued out in urgent gushes.
The bloodstained comforter. The teddy bear. The dental pick.
Ordinary items, now part of this nightmarish tableau. Items that belonged in this town house…except for one.
Dark remembered watching Wycoff picking at his teeth on Air Force Two just a few hours ago. The man was OCD when it came to his teeth.
A dental pick wasn’t something a seventeen-year-old girl would keep around; it had bothered Dark when he first saw it on the video a few days ago, but it didn’t click until earlier that morning when he met with Wycoff.
Still, it was just a hunch. Which was why Dark grabbed the liquor bottle and protected the evidence in a barf bag. Now the DNA testing had confirmed the worst. Finally, Dark understood the urgency. The threats. The fury.
And while it didn’t excuse the secretary of defense’s actions the past few days, Dark could understand them.
It was abuse of power by reason of insanity.
He’d do anything to protect his Sweet Charlotte the Harlot.
And punish her killer.
Dark needed to make his next move carefully. And for now, this meant not bringing Riggins or Constance into it. He thumbed a number on his BlackBerry and waited.
“I need to speak with Secretary Wycoff immediately,” Dark said. “Tell him I’ve got his answer.”
chapter 65
6:19 A.M.
Within twenty minutes a black SUV had scooped up Dark from 11000 Wilshire and deposited him in Beverly Hills. Now he was standing in Norman Wycoff’s plush, woody room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The inside smelled like fast-food hamburgers and cigar smoke. Apparently the man liked to be located in the heart of things at all times. In this case, the heart of the most expensive real estate on the West Coast.
Wycoff had managed a shower since the last time Dark saw him, on Air Force Two. He had a towel draped over his neck, and tiny beads of water still clung to his red peach-fuzz hair, as well as his solid frame. Dark had never seen him out of a suit before and was surprised to see that Wycoff kept himself in shape.
“Where’s Riggins?” Wycoff asked.
“I came straight to you, Mr. Secretary. Figured you’d want to know first.”
Wycoff seemed unsure how to respond. With gratitude? Annoyance? He went with a little of both.
“I appreciate that, Dark. But why wouldn’t I want Riggins to know? We’re all on the same team here.”
“Are we?”
“What kind of a question is—”
“Riggins was right,” Dark said. “Sqweegel’s never left a single piece of physical evidence in the three decades we’ve been tracking him. But I should qualify that statement. He’s never left pieces of evidence by mistake. Sometimes, he leaves things on purpose.”
“So you’re saying he left that toothpick thing on the ground for us to find? I’m lucky my men even saw it.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“To what end?”
“To point us in your direction.”
Wycoff went pale, then sat down on the overstuffed couch in the middle of the room. He looked down at his thumbs, then back up at Dark. “Tell me what you know.”
Dark returned his stare for a few moments, then walked to the other side of the room and grabbed the back of a dark wood chair with leather pads. He positioned it a few feet in front of Wycoff. He didn’t want this to be an interrogation. He wanted them looking eye to eye, colleague to colleague.
“Riggins gave me the files on the slaughter of Charlotte Sweeney. It was a heinous crime, even for Sqweegel. And her infant son witnessed the whole thing.”
Wycoff flinched, then did his best to recover. “I know what’s in the file,” he snapped angrily. “Where are you going with this?”
“That child is yours, which explains the sudden pressure on Special Circs to find the animal who killed his mother. Your mistress, or whatever word you’d prefer, Mr. Secretary.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind. She was fucking seventeen years old.”
“Yes, she was.”
“I’m not going to listen to this bullshit—”
“Sqweegel pressures you, so you pressure us,” Dark said. “Don’t you understand, Mr. Secretary? He’s pulling our strings, and we’re all dancing like little fucking puppets. There’s nothing we’re doing that he didn’t plan out in advance, ten moves deep. You have us playing checkers, and he’s playing three-dimensional chess.”
“I have children,” Wycoff said. “But not by that poor girl. My son and daughter attend Sidwell Friends with the daughters of the president of the United States, for Christ’s sake!”
“It wasn’t difficult to match your DNA to the dental floss.”
“My DNA…,” Wycoff started, then shook his head. “How did you get my DNA? That’s supposed to be c
lassified!”
“Classified? There’s no such thing, Mr. Secretary. Unless you wear a suit like Sqweegel, you and I and everyone we know leave DNA everywhere. I could scrape up enough from your toothbrush to clone you.”
Wycoff took the Lord’s name in vain again, then suddenly vaulted up from the couch. Dark almost felt bad for him. This was not going the way he’d planned.
But then again—fuck him. He was hiding behind the president and using them all to carry out some elaborate mission of vengeance against the monster who’d tortured and killed his mistress and left his bastard son to watch. The one who, in all likelihood, wouldn’t be attending Sidwell Friends.
Dark didn’t care about any of that, though. What mattered was that they stop playing into Sqweegel’s hands. And that meant everything coming out in the open—at least among the team hunting him.
Sqweegel had been escalating, but he didn’t leave it to the federal government to step up the search on their own. No. He ensured that retaliation would be swift and crushing. He went right to the top. Even beyond the Justice Department.
Sqweegel liked to send messages. His message to Wycoff was crystal clear: If you can’t keep your self-indulgence safe, how are you supposed to keep the country safe?
“Where’s the boy now?” Dark asked. “At least tell me you’ve got him under police protection.”
“Charlotte Sweeney’s baby is fine.”
“You don’t fucking get it, do you?” Dark asked. “I need to know everything. How he contacted you. What he said. It’s the only way I can catch this monster. You want him caught, don’t you? Caught and punished for his crimes before he kills and kills again?”
Wycoff said nothing at first. He clenched his big hands until his knuckles turned white, then unclenched them. The secretary of defense was not used to being at a loss for words or a clear course of action. He was not used to being caught up and strangled in his own lie.
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